For Community and Family Story Collectors

We invite viewers to bring generations together at home, in libraries, community centers, senior centers, churches, synagogues, historical societies, schools, and museums.

With smartphones, social media, live streaming, and blogs, Americans today are vitally involved in telling their stories. Like photographs or mementoes, documentary films stimulate storytelling about people's own lives. Many Folkstreams films can inspire intergenerational conversations and experiences.

Our personal folklore is often invisible to us, like water is to a fish. "Doesn't everyone do that?," we might ask. Well, no! Folklore is universal but it is also unique to individuals and communities. We advocate using Folkstreams films to raise questions and spark discussions among senior citizens and in mixed groups of young and old. Looking back on "The Film of Your Life" is useful not only as biography, but as a way of sharing elders' wisdom with their children, grandchildren, friends, and community members.

Folklorist Daniel Patterson writes "the subjects of many Folkstreams documentaries are community scholars, experts in locally specific traditions that bespeak a region, an era, a family. These cultural insiders are virtuosos of the traditions shown. They give viewers access to authorities whom they cannot find in academia and are rarely given voice in books. The films accordingly are extremely important social and aesthetic documents. The films are also valuable historical documents, not only because they take viewers directly into social worlds (the work, play, struggles, and worship of often extraordinary ordinary people) now passing more and more into the historical past, but also because the films themselves are the products of historical movements and attitudes. They preserve the life of specific times and places and also embody the limitations and opportunities, the ideologies and insights of their makers."

We invite viewers to bring generations together at home, in libraries, community centers, senior centers, churches, synagogues, historical societies, schools, and museums. Below we recommend topics to get started:

Personal and Family History

What is the story of your name?

The names of your family members?

How far back can you trace your family past your grandparents?

Where did your ancestors come from? What languages did they speak?

What kinds of work did your father and mother do?

Where have you lived and traveled?

What kind of work have you done?

How much schooling have you had?

Do you have any family photo albums?

Family and Community Traditions

What do you remember about the house that you grew up in? The community?

What are the special occasions that your family celebrates?

What are the homemade foods that you love? What recipes do you want to hand down?

What were your favorite games as a child?

What music has meant most to you?

What kind of dancing do you know and remember?

What kinds of medicine did you take when you were sick?

Did your family use any home remedies?

How were they made?

Which are still in use today?

Who were your childhood heroes?

Your heroes as an adult?

What are your favorite pastimes and hobbies?

Do you remember any stories that were told to you as a child? (Ghost stories, local legends, tales about family members, jokes, riddles)

What is an obstacle that you overcame?

Where and how do you express your religious life (or not)?

Resources

These online guides provide rich ideas and essential tools for intergenerational interviews and documenting community culture.